A little sugar in your coffee can revolutionize the world.

Photo by Wikimedia

Who doesn't love their morning coffee?  Here in Louisiana it's a requirement to have at least one cup of coffee to start the day.  And of course, I love my two spoons of sugar to sweeten the cup just a bit.  Down here we are surrounded by sugar cane fields, so no one gives it a second thought.  Except for me, of course! Where did the original idea to squeeze some sugar out of tall grasses come from?  My snooping around found some interesting things about sugar. Let's take a look at the journey of sugar as far as the granular stuff we consume today.


It is believed that sugar cane was first domesticated in what is now known as New Guinea.  This is estimated at a very rough number of 8,000 years ago.  Keep in mind this is on the boundary of the Stone Age and the Bronze Age.  So farming is still small and primitive.  Sugar cane slowly found it's way through Indonesia and up to Asia.  Then later, around 600 A.D., spice trade routes started introducing parts of Europe to the sweet granules.  Interestingly, in both Asian and Arabic languages the word sugar means "gravel" or "sand".  The problem was that making sugar was labor intensive.  Hours and hours of harvesting, squeezing, boiling, and dehydrating made for very high prices.  When the British came to power in India, they created the East India Company.  One of the goals of the company was to harvest sugar cane in India at a cheap enough price to appease the folks back home.  They created better presses and vessels that could boil the sugary soup faster.  At the time they would press the sugar into cubes or a "sugar-loaf" which looks like a cone.  That's why the Brits like one lump or two.  The problem was that lump was almost as expensive as a nugget of gold. Then that pretty boy, Chris Columbus sailed the Ocean blue and found the West Indies.  Finally, some more tropical lands to plant the sugary grasses from New Guinea.  Again, still labor intensive.  So the British put their best blacksmiths on the job.  They built better presses.  Made machinery that ran off of water gravity systems.  The Brits even learned to boil in a vacuum vessel to save time and fuel.  These new innovations brought the price of sugar down.  So they had to build a sugar mill at every sugar cane plantation.  It is estimated that by early 1800 their were some 3,000 sugar mills in the New World alone.  All in the name of some sweet coffee.

Photo by Geograph.

Then something remarkable happened.  All those blacksmiths went back to Britain with new ideas of machinery.  They started applying their new forging ideas and tools to other things, such as weaving, paper production, and even steel.  By the mid 1800's the Industrial Revolution was born. Meanwhile sugar was now cheap enough to add to bitter chocolate, cakes, pies, and breads.  You see, we owe our modern world and all it's conveniences to the Industrial Revolution.  And we owe the Industrial Revolution to the quest for sugar.  But now we've come full circle.  This incredible sweet crystal, that Romans believe healed ailments, (sound like early Coke?) is now bad for us. We have to much sugar and now I have to drink Diet Soda instead.  Or even worse, I have to drink water. Why is everything that taste good, bad for you? Anyways, keep in mind that just when you start to doubt the human race remember, mankind has turned the world into a mass producing, industrial monster, all in the quest for a little sweet juice from a grass.

HAVE A SWEET DAY!

Facts check in Wikipedia